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LENS

Bessie Fontenelle in 1967 reading a letter from a son who was in the hospital for drug addiction.Credit Gordon Parks, courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation

In 1968, the Life magazine photographer Gordon Parks riveted the nation with a photo essay on the grinding daily struggles of the Fontenelles, a desperately poor family in Harlem.

Only one of the family’s eight children, Richard Fontenelle, lived past the age of 30. He evaded the grim fates of his siblings, who fell to drugs and crime and AIDS, in part through his continued connection to Parks, who died in 2006 at age 95.

Ricky Flores’s photos of the South Bronx in the 1980s belie the grim stereotype of a crime-ridden, burning borough. The stripped cars, hip-hop culture and the buildings aflame are there, but so is the full range of human experience and emotion. The photographer’s images from that era, along with those of five others, will be displayed in a new exhibition opening this weekend at the Bronx Documentary Center.

Brenda Ann Kenneally’s photographs, featured on the Lens blog, document the poverty-stricken life of Andy Velazquez, a boy who grew up on her block in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her subject and friend was first captured at age 8 and on throughout his tragic adolescence. Raised by a drug-addicted mother, he relied on selling drugs and eschewed school. Ms. Kenneally’s pictures were published in The New York Times Magazine in 2002 and in a book in 2005.

From 1950 to 1990, a procession of 60-foot-long color transparencies took their turns on the east balcony of Grand Central Terminal, showing an idealized world available to those who purchased Kodak photographic equipment. From sweeping mountain panoramas to scenes of domestic bliss, the Kodak Coloramas have returned, albeit at much smaller size: prints of the images are now on display at the New York Transit Museum annex at Grand Central. Read more and see the slide show on Lens.

Carl Mydans, Courtesy of the New York Public LibraryTasting meats at the Department of Agriculture, Beltsville, Md.

The Farm Security Administration’s project to photograph life in Depression-era America yielded a national image archive of incomparable depth and breadth. Most of the images — 175,000 negatives and 1,600 color transparencies — are housed in the Library of Congress. But 41,000 prints were sent in the 1930s and ’40s to the New York Public Library, where they languished largely forgotten and uncataloged.

Now they have been cataloged, and it turns out 1,000 of the images at the New York Public Library are not in the main collection in Washington. Soon, they will be online. For now, the Lens blog has a show of them. Read the story and feast on the photos on Lens.

Dimitri Mellos, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology who daylights as a street photographer, captures moments most New Yorkers ignore. Surreal moments bathed in the midday light that sneaks through cracks between tall buildings. Or moments like the one above.

“Often, people ask me whether some of the pictures are staged, because they find it so hard to believe that these coincidences could be occurring,” Mr. Mellos told the Lens blog. “It just means people aren’t paying attention.”

When she moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn, six years ago, Erica McDonald, a New York-based photographer, started documenting the neighborhood, hoping to capture part of its essence — the part that is not made up of strollers, cafes and lovingly maintained brownstones — before it vanished.

Her black-and-white photos, “The Dark Light of This Nothing,” are not a manifesto on gentrification, but “a snapshot of the neighborhood as it was at that moment.” Peter Moskowitz wrote about the series on the Lens blog this morning.

In the fall of 1943, a Harlem resident named Sidney Bernstein took a street portrait of Earl Johnston, a young boy in Far Rockaway, Queens. Someone named J. Johnston — presumably one of Earl’s parents — signed a release that allowed Mr. Bernstein to submit the photo to a picture contest.

Today, the photo lives in an album included in “Kodak Historical Collection #003,” nestled within the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections & Preservation of the Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester. That album and three others hold photos from the Eastman Kodak Company’s contests that started in 1929, when there were 750,000 submissions, and continued into the 1940s.

While the early picture contests were national — and by the 1930s, international — there was no shortage of submissions from intrepid New York photographers. The Lens blog features a slide show of photos from New York, some of which will appear in the Metropolitan section on Sunday. Read more about the contest.

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